Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 3)

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! As of October 2018, I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Updated for the seventh time between September and November 2018, this definitive Guantánamo prisoner list was first published in March 2009, and subsequently updated from four parts to six (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6). I first updated it on January 1, 2010, and again on July 12, 2010, and I updated it for the third time at the start of June 2011, to mark the fourth anniversary of the start of my almost daily publication of articles about Guantánamo. That update also included previously unseen photos from the classified military files released by WikiLeaks, on which I worked as a media partner. It was updated for the fourth time on the first anniversary of WikiLeaks’ release of “The Guantánamo Files,” and was updated for the fifth time on March 7, 2014, five years after its first publication — an update that contained more photos from the files released by WikiLeaks. The sixth update in October 2016 contained additional photos, as well as important information about the status of the 61 prisoners still held at the time.

The definitive prisoner list is a key element of my ongoing work (now in its 13th year) calling for the closure of the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and telling the stories of the men held there. The first fruit of my initial research was my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, in which I told the story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, established, for the first time, a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these prisoners, and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

Since May 2007, I have written over 2,200 articles about Guantánamo, expanding on and updating my initial work, providing research, analysis and commentary, as well as regularly campaigning to get the prison closed — particularly via the Close Guantánamo campaign I established in 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner, and We Stand With Shaker, established in 2014 with the activist Joanne MacInnes, which played a part in securing the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, in October 2015.

Along the way, I have covered the stories of the 339 prisoners released from Guantánamo since June 2007 — 142 under George W. Bush, 196 under Barack Obama, and just one under Donald Trump — in unprecedented depth. I have also covered the stories of the 30 prisoners charged in Guantánamo’s military commissions (although only eight men have been convicted, and several of those convictions have been overturned on appeal), and I also covered the men’s habeas corpus petitions in detail from 2008 to 2011, until they were disgracefully shut down by appeals court judges in Washington, D.C.

In President Obama’s last years, I assiduously covered the Periodic Review Boards, convened to assess the cases of 64 men who had not been approved for release or recommended for trials by an earlier review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force. The PRB process began in November 2013, and resulted in 38 men being approved for release (of whom 36 were released before Obama left office), while 26 others had their ongoing imprisonment upheld.

As a result of my work over the last twelve and a half years, this is the most comprehensive list ever published of the 779 prisoners who have been held by the US military at Guantánamo, providing details of the 729 prisoners who have been released (and the dates of their release), the nine men who have died, the one man transferred to the US mainland for a trial, and the 40 prisoners who are still held (including five men approved for release), as well as those designated for prosecution or ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

It is my hope, as it has been since I established this prisoner list nine and a half years ago, that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as “illegal enemy combatants.”

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

And finally, as Guantánamo remains open under Donald Trump (after Obama failed to close it, despite promising to do so on his second day in office), I hope that it also provides useful information for those still seeking to close Guantánamo, and to bring to an end this bleak chapter in American history.

Andy Worthington, London, October 11, 2018

How to use the list

In the categories below, ISN refers to the Internment Serial Number by which the prisoners are (or were) known and identified in Guantánamo, followed by the prisoners’ status (released, cleared for release, still held, or, in nine cases, deceased), their names (with just some of the many different permutations noted, in some cases), their nationality, and links to articles I have written about them, or which include references to them, or references to chapters in The Guantánamo Files. Links on the release dates feed into articles published when the prisoners were released.

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo, co-director, We Stand With Shaker. Also, singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers) and photographer (The State of London). Email Andy Worthington